Then he got to the interesting tidbit. “Seems like she takes on some no-pay cases on her own time,” Smith said. “She goes after Indian bones and artifacts and sends them back to the tribes they came from. She just shipped off a box of stuff like that within the week, in fact. If she’s doing this for nothing, I’d say she’s pretty motivated about it.”

“Oh, really?” Rod Calligan’s hand moved of itself to his good-luck charm in his pants pocket, but his eyes moved to the boxes of loot from that Indian graveyard, artifacts that had looked like they might be worth something, and which he hadn’t used to salt the construction site.

He smiled.

“What do you mean by that?” Smith demanded testily.

Rod’s smile widened. “Only,” he replied softly, “that I think I can promise I know how to pull her strings.”

CHAPTER SIX

THIS HAD BEEN her first full day on the case. By now, sunset was only a memory, and Jennifer was just grateful she knew the entire Tulsa metroplex like her own backyard. Otherwise it would have been impossible to find all these addresses. Some of these little suburban areas had streets that wound around through them with no plan that she could make out. This was one of them, and it took her fifteen minutes to find the right “Ridley,” for there was a “Ridley Street,” a “Ridley Way,” a “Ridley Court,” and a “Ridley Place,” all within blocks of one another. She pulled the Brat up in front of the third house on her list, only to find it dark, with no signs of vehicles anywhere. Not in the garage, nor the driveway, nor the street outside.

What is this, bingo night? It’s too early in the year for softball league, and too late for bowling. This was ridiculous; there hadn’t been a single soul home so far who was on her list of Calligan’s ex-employees. It was beginning to feel like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

Well, no point in sticking around here. There was some traffic on the road, but not much. She waited until the car behind her had pulled around her parking place, then got back on the street again. Surely someone was going to be home!

The fourth name on her list was a guy who lived out in Sand Springs, not Tulsa. With any luck, whatever it was that had pulled everyone out of their houses here in town would not be something that someone in Sand Springs would want to drive all the way into Tulsa for. At the end of a long workday, a twenty-minute drive could seem much too long.

Unless it’s a Garth Brooks concert or something. Nothing too much to go through for a Garth Brooks concert.